High performance computing (HPC) workloads can involve applications whose communication is organized in regular patterns. A parallel implementation of an HPC application may be parallelized across a number of nodes, where some nodes may be exchanging messages over the network with a first, smaller set of nodes and/or exchanging other messages with a second, larger set of nodes. The underlying networking topology for this HPC cluster may include a complex general-purpose multi-level switch topology (e.g., fat trees and/or folded clos), where network performance links may be kept active through synchronization messages and/or explicit configuration of switch routes,